Jeff Martin from the Tea Party was spotted backstage at the blues festival last summer. What was he doing at the blues festival? Digging the blues, of course.

He shared several pieces of good news: His wife Nicole gave birth to a son (Django), the Tea Party got a lot of money to open for Def Leppard, his band was working on material for a new album and he was finding inspiration sitting in with blues jams at Blues on Whyte while in Edmonton. He seemed his usual giddy self. But then he disappeared - only to surface with news that the Tea Party was no more and he'd gone solo, operating out of Ireland, where he is now a permanent resident. He lives in Southwest Cork, one imagines just down the lane from Hamfast Baggins in the Hobbitshire of Southfarthing.

Yes, rock stars lead interesting lives.

Martin plays Wednesday at Red's with a new band, supporting his new solo album Exile and the Kingdom.

"Lots of changes," Martin says with a laugh.

It turns out that even at the time of the blues festival, "the writing was on the wall," to coin a title of a popular Tea Party song he uses twice as an example of the kind of thing he wasn't into - and one of several things that brought about the demise of the Tea Party. What made it worse is how he dealt with it.

Moving to Ireland "I think saved my life," he says. "Hindsight being 20/20, I was really depressed for a while. I wasn't happy with what was happening with the Tea Party, but I hid it well, except for the way that I hid it. I really hit my vices hard. I had to cover up my disappointment with alcohol and drugs, and it just got to a point, after the Def Leppard tour, that I didn't want to do it anymore. I felt like I was spinning my wheels with the band.

"The last two records weren't really where I wanted the band to go. I wanted to get back to the magic of The Edges of Twilight and what made the band famous, which was that world music meets hard rock music. That's my love of music right there. The other two guys didn't want to do that."

Breaking up is hard to do, he continues. The other two guys - Jeff Burrows and Stuart Chatwood - are presumably not pleased with their volatile frontman. For his part, Martin knows a burnt bridge when he sees it, says "maybe some day we'll be able to be friends again," but doubts the band will ever reform.

OK, so you can move away and start with a clean slate, but you can't run away from yourself. Might Martin's problems follow him all the way to the Emerald Isle?

"You have to look really deep inside and figure out the causes of it all," he says. "Conventional rehab wouldn't have worked for me at all. I needed to make make a lot of decisions for myself and the only way I could really do it is with self-imposed exile. And that's where Ireland came into play."

He set to work straightaway. His old pal Roy Harper - who was brought along as an opening act on the Tea Party's first Canadian tour in 1993 - more or less talked Martin into "coming home" to Ireland, though Martin was actually born in Windsor. Harper isn't the only Led Zeppelin connection here (they wrote a song about him called Hats Off to Harper). Michael Lee, drummer on the Page-Plant tour, has joined Martin in his quest to fuse world music with hard rock - which is what Led Zeppelin was trying to do.

Martin says, "It's a match made in heaven. People say I can play like Jimmy Page, so as far as Michael Lee and me and a rock band, it's very powerful. It's a much fuller sound than the Tea Party. People have already been saying it's like the new Led Zeppelin. It's quite a bit to live up to, but I'll take that to the bank."

Oy, vey, there he goes again. Readers might recall the last time Martin put his foot in it for an Edmonton Sun interview, saying it's "pretty brave" of Sum 41 to follow the Tea Party at the Stage 13 rock festival. The punks took umbrage and poured their scorn on the hapless Martin. And now he's the new Led Zeppelin. But before the alt-rock press gets its knickers in a knot again, at least admit that the man has balls. He takes chances, risks further ridicule in an inherently ridiculous art form - rock 'n' roll - and is not afraid to speak his mind.

On the fact that Exile and the Kingdom sounds like a folky new Tea Party album, he says, "I don't want to be cocky about this, but I wrote all the Tea Party songs, so nothing much is going to change except the name. The Tea Party was me. Now it's just different people helping me to make the same music."

On old comparisons that never went away - voice of Jim Morrison, guitar style of Jimmy Page - he says, "It's not too bad to get compared to those guys. If I were getting compared to Jon Bon Jovi, I'd have some concerns."

Talk turns to the fertile new land Martin will find inspiration in. If he wasn't deep into mystical blarney before - just listen to his lyrics - he sure will be now. His 300-year-old stone farmhouse on the seaside is a short walk from an ancient Druidic circle, he says, where "you can really feel the energy," and not far by car to the house of his mentor Roy Harper, whom Martin likens to "Merlin."

Man, he's going to get into this stuff deep.

He replies, "Well, why not?"

Good answer. Self-awareness is the path to healing.